via BCNN1:
A fabled, more than 100-year-old football rivalry played out at today’s Army-Navy game where another story also came to the fore.
A 20-year-old West Point cadet, Simone Askew, became the first African-American woman to lead the traditional march-on ceremony at the game. As first captain, Askew, who is also a Rhodes Scholar, led a roughly 4,400-member Corps of Cadets onto the Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia prior to the 118th Army-Navy game.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson administered the coin toss before the game, which Askew’s Army team won 14-13 after Navy missed a last-second field goal. Afterward, Tillerson presented Army with the Commander-in-Chief’s trophy.
Askew’s mother was excited about her daughter’s leading role in the pregame march, but in a way, she wasn’t entirely surprised. Askew got the idea to attend a military academy when as a young girl she saw this same ceremony, called the march-on.
“She literally saw the [Navy] midshipmen march in formation onto the field and rose up from her chair and pointed at them and said to me, ‘What does it take to lead that?’” her mother, Pam Askew, told ABC News of the first Navy game that Simone, of Fairfax, Virginia, attended.
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